The biggest challenge before Akhilesh Yadav, clearly the man of the moment in Uttar Pradesh, is to strike a delicate balance between the old and the new players in the Samajwadi Party while forming his Cabinet.
Dynastic politics is entrenched so firmly in India — right from Kashmir to Kanyakumari and from the Abdullahs, through the Gandhis to the Karunanidhi family — that eyebrows are no longer raised at the baton passing over from father to son.
Twitterdom, of course, had a great time last week in taking potshots at M.K.Stalin, heir apparent to the DMK chief, M.Karunanidhi. With the DMK being squashed by the J.Jayalalithaa-led AIADMK in the Tamil Nadu Assembly elections last year, Stalin continues to be a CM-in-waiting.
But while Stalin cools his heels, Akhilesh has left no doubt that the people of UP, particularly the young, were enthused by his fresh-faced approach in the electoral battlefield. Firmly keeping out the likes of D.P.Yadav, focusing on the development agenda, and offering sops such as laptops and minority quotas, all turned out to be winners.
While political pundits were forecasting SP as the largest single party, what no one, perhaps not even the Mulayam-Akhilesh duo, expected was a robust majority for the SP with 224 seats. Dynasty or not, in all fairness it has to be admitted that this was an election that Akhilesh won for his party.
Son of the soil image
Right from convincing his father to get rid of the controversial Amar Singh, to charting out an election strategy that worked, this is his moment.
At 38, Akhilesh is going to be the youngest CM of UP; Mayawati was 39 when she became UP CM for the first time in 1995. Soon after the hurdles were cleared for his anointment as CM, he announced that his priorities would include improving law and order, and keeping the promises he had made in his relentless campaign. In promising laptops to UP's students, this Australia-educated environment engineer was smart enough to say that Hindi as well as Urdu could also be used on laptops and tablets. Those who watched his interviews on TV channels before and after the elections could not have failed to note how assiduously he answers in Hindi all questions put to him in English.
UP continues to be a land where English-speaking is associated with not only elitism but also snobbery. And Akhilesh has been politically astute to cultivate carefully his image as son-of-of the soil, who speaks the people's lingo.
Despite all his hard work, at the end of the day, the Congress scion Rahul Gandhi was seen by UP's voters as not only an outsider but also a little elitist… somebody who was not part of their world. Akhilesh, by contrast, was; and that won him the day.
Regional players flex muscle
The SP's thumping victory has stirred up a hornet's nest in Dilli. Political circles are agog with talk of a non-Congress, non-BJP and even non-Left front… a kind of a loose canon or a ‘fourth front' coming together for the next Lok Sabha polls.
The natural members of such a front would be regional heroes and heroines of the moment, such as SP's Mulayam and Akhilesh Yadav, Trinamool's Mamata Banerjee, AIADMK's J.Jayalalithaa and the Akali Dal's Prakash Singh Badal. Biju Janata Dal's Naveen Patnaik and the Bihar strongman Nitish Kumar would be natural allies, too.
All these regional parties will demand a much stronger federal character, more power and, of course, more money from the central kitty.
With Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy no longer on the scene and his son Jagan Reddy's revolt bound to hurt the Congress, Telugu Desam Party's Chandrababu Naidu could also become a valuable ally for such a Front. And Sharad Pawar, of course, would be too happy to jump where the pasture is greener.
In recent times, election after election has proved the dwindling of the power and clout of central parties such as the Congress, of course, but also the BJP. The Congress's sorry plight is thanks to an ineffective, listless UPA II regime, many of whose members have been caught with their hands in the till.
The BJP, on the other hand, is a house divided. With prominent leaders publicly squabbling over supremacy in the party, the BJP is no longer able to speak in one voice. Also, what hurts it even more is its inability to shed its “communal” tag and emerge as a party that can ensure inclusive growth in an India poised for an economic miracle. Provided it gets honest, effective and efficient governance, with fresh new ideas, the Left, with its anti-reforms agenda, would be seen as a hindrance to such a Front, and anyway, its present status after the West Bengal debacle, is emaciated. Mamata Didi also is seen as anti-reforms, but that can change; she is smart enough to listen to the aspirations of Bengalis.
While Anna Hazare is no longer the flavour of the moment, it cannot be denied that his bringing to the fore the rampant corruption in the UPA government has certainly hurt the Congress in UP.
Message from UP
But the message from an “underdeveloped” or pichda pradesh like UP is loud and clear for the entire country. Political parties that promise the moon, but deliver precious little, will have to make way for others who can do a better job.
And the growing numbers of young in today's India want a better future; they are no longer willing to be fooled by talk of religious identity, bogies of communal, casteist or social repression. And they don't want absentee landlords to govern them from faraway Dilli. They want their netas to be in closer physical proximity and answerable to them.
The coming years are going to see the rise of regional parties, which will ensure a stronger federal character at the Centre.
If in the next Lok Sabha elections, mid-term or in 2014, people vote decisively for regional parties as they have done in West Bengal, Bihar, UP, Punjab — Tamil Nadu, of course, has a longer history of the Dravidian parties thrashing the Congress — we might see both the Congress and the BJP sitting in the Opposition, or one of them reluctantly providing outside support to such a Front of strong regional parties.